Researchers
Dr. Gretchen Van de Walle
Dr. Van de Walle’s interest in early conceptual development began when she worked as an undergraduate research assistant in an infant perception lab at Swarthmore College. After obtaining her Ph.D. at Cornell University, she completed a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at NYU before coming to Rutgers-Newark in the Fall of 1998. Her research investigates the perceptual an conceptual information infants employ in coming to better understand the environment around them and how the early acquisition of language influences this understanding.
For example, she is interested in how infants learn to distinguish broad, ontological categories such as animate vs. inanimate objects and what they know about these categories. One recent research project, in collaboration with her former student Diana Del Console, employs an eye-tracking system to ask whether infants understand that the behavior of animate objects like people or animals is meaningfully directed at the surrounding environment in a way that is quite distinct from that of inanimates. She is also interested in how children learn to trace specific individual objects over time and occlusion - an ability so effortless and so basic to adults that we rarely give it a second thought. Most recently, in collaboration with her colleague Jennifer Austin and her former graduate student Cassandra Foursha, she has begun to investigate toddlers’ understanding of how word order conveys meaning in sentences. They hope soon to expand this research to investigate syntactic knowledge in children who are in the process of acquiring two languages.
Graduate Students
Megan Geerdts
Megan joined the lab in 2009 as a graduate student in the cognitive psychology PhD program at Rutgers University. She completed her B.A. with honors at The College of New Jersey in 2009. Her honors thesis focused on the relationship between early parent-child play behaviors and joint attention episodes and later cognitive development.
Her current research interest is the relationship between parent-child interaction and children’s conceptual development, especially about biological entities. She recently completed currently a study which took place at a local zoo and science museum to investigate how families talk about animals. Her current study involves looking at how family pets influence children’s understanding about biological processes.
Katy-Ann Blacker
Katy-Ann initially joined the lab in 2009 as an undergraduate research assistant. Her honors thesis explored young children’s comprehension word order and pronoun case forms in English monolingual children using a preferential looking task. After having completed her B.A. in psychology with honors at Rutgers University in 2011, she is continuing her study of cognitive development and language acquisition as a graduate student in the cognitive psychology Ph.D. program at Rutgers University.
Undergraduate Research Assistants
Courtney Bode
Courtney is a senior Psychology major at Rutgers. She plans to go to graduate school for cognitive psychology. She is interested in children’s conceptions of number, and how their environment aids in this development.
Tahnia Hawkins
Derek Le
Sachini Tissera
Tahnia is a junior psychology major at Rutgers. She loves working with children and plans to pursue graduate study in the field of developmental psychology. Her ultimate goal is to become a licensed psychologist and open a child development center of her own, providing education and mental health services to children and their families.
Sachini is currently an undergraduate senior studying at Rutgers University. She is majoring in psychology while also doing pre-med in order to fulfill her dream of becoming a psychiatrist. She enjoys singing, writing songs, and is currently writing a novel. She is also known for her artistic ability in drawing.
Derek is currently studying psychology as an undergraduate at Rutgers. He loves children and has a strong interest in the role of the environment in early conceptual development and language development.
Ana is going on her fourth year at Rutgers University in Newark. She is majoring in psychology and with her degree plans to pursue a career in counseling.
Vivian is a senior at Rutgers and is majoring in psychology with a minor in biology. She plans to attend graduate school for occupational therapy and hopes to work with children in schools.
